- I’ve liked using GitLab but it’s definitely felt like their IPO lead to more chasing flash and less attention to quality. They yanked the support rep which customers used to get–everything goes through sales now–and started putting most features behind the hefty Ultimate price tier, and there are so many cute features which need more polish but since they’re not “AI” it seems like they’re ignored even though they have open issues with years of customers saying they have the same problem.
This has lead to a game: each time the sale pitch claiming big wins for their AI tools arrives, ask “when will we start seeing GitLab development back to pre-IPO speed?”
- >Speed. The GitLab web interface has always felt sluggish to me.
10 years later the same problem remains. While Gitea / Forgejo have very little performance problems. And will only get better once Go 1.26 is out. Which is a much bigger release than a single digit version number upgrade.
by NorwegianDude
0 subcomment
- I've been using GitLab since the early days, but a week ago I switched to Forgejo. Power usage on the server dropped by 10%, despite both being idle most of the time.
As the author says, GitLab feels sluggish, and is bloated with 1001 thing I'd never use that just makes the UI a pain. Despite all the features I don't need, some that I would benefit from are disabled in the free version.
Forgejo is simpler. It allows me to hide features per project that I don't need. Bit there are some tradeoffs. Updates on GitLab was great. I've been letting it self update for years with no issues. This does not work on Forgejo. Forgejo is also a lot less polished, and some features just doesn't seem to work like they should.
by publicdebates
3 subcomments
- Tangent, but fantastic website. Honestly it was a pleasure just to read it and click around on it. I'm not sure if the design and idea was your own or part of some Jekyll theme, but the execution is just fantastic. Couldn't find the source in your GitHub repos, but maybe I just didn't look hard enough.
- I switched from GitLab to Forgejo for my private projects after not wanting to deal with how slow GitLab's interface is anymore.
I still have proper CI, issue tracking, and all other features I care about, but the interface loads instantly and my screen isn't filled with many features I'll never use for my private projects.
by vibe_assassin
2 subcomments
- I didn't know people disliked GitLab. I use it for work and while some things could definitely be improved, overall I find it to be a pretty intuitive and easy experience. They could definitely improve user management at the admin vs group level (you cant see LDAP sync settings in admin panel, you have to navigate to the group) but overall I don't get frustrated using it. It's CICD syntax is a breeze for the most part too
by shevy-java
2 subcomments
- > Feature overload. GitLab tries to be everything.
This is the primary reason I dislike GitLab. It is so complicated to use.
Github issue trackers are so simple to use.
Perhaps GitLab offers more features for project owners, but as a user, I much prefer github. Of course I'd prefer it even more if Microsoft wouldn't control github ...
- > The 10GB limit per project sounds small on paper but I’ve never come close to hitting it
The docker images don't have limits, there is a limit per layer. IIRC I've distributed a 100GB image through their free tier (just had to make sure to keep the layer size small enough).
Update: Sources
https://docs.gitlab.com/user/storage_usage_quotas/
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/container-registry/-/issues/10...
- While it‘s pretty great to have such a unified interface, there are many papercuts.
To me it has become a bit of a meme that you always end up in this old-issue flow: I want to do X -> Try it -> Run into an issue -> Search for solution -> Find an official bugreport that is 3-8y old. Also many features seem to be stuck in either the 80/20 hell or it the „we needed a bulletpoint on a feature list and built a barely working MVP“-situation. The slow interface, as mentioned in other comments, is so incredibly painful on MR-views that it drives me crazy some days.
- We switched to gitlab at work about five years ago and this perfectly summarizes my experience. Add to that Gitlab projects also have a included Maven, NPM and python compatible package registry, so you can just push your package back in the CI pipeline is one of my favourite features as a smaller team. My least favorite feature is actually the sheer number of features. There is actually too many features. And the constant waiting. Basically every screen is just twice as slow as I would like to wait.
- Forgejo does all that while being lightweight and run by a non-profit. Gitlab is awfully resource hungry.
- GitLab is about to tank in quality hard. Completely new leadership team in the last 6 months, IYKYK
Give it 1-2 years, feature quantity will take precedence over feature quality
- Busy moving from gitlab to forgejo. Gitlab is nice but it’s really heavy for home use. Even just loading the repo list is noticeable not instant. Something that is ultimately a pretty simple page
by computerfriend
0 subcomment
- If you log into your GitLab account from a Hong Kong IP address, they'll delete your account after 60 days and tell you to use JiHu, a Chinese company, instead.
- Never understood why I get the weird looks if I tell people that I use GitLab. Like CICD is really good and lots of useful features are free.
- It was once a cool alternative to gitlab. Self hostable, open source, etc... Now it's bloated hell. Everything from source control, to project management. I don't have good experiences with it in recent years
- For a long time I self hosted Gitlab, and was always quite happy with it, but I recently moved my VPS and decided to give Forgejo a try, and I have to say it's refreshing. It's really fast and takes a fraction of the resources Gitlab does. I'm sure Gitlab have more features, but frankly, I wasn't using them. I still like Gitlab, we use it at work and it does a good job, but for my own needs I don't see myself switching back any time soon.
- I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, but does anyone else still work in an environment where they have to do synchronous version control? It's a nightmare and I have yet to find a decent solution.
To give an idea, this is a proprietary system that is extendable via scripts, but all of the artifacts are exported via XML files where script source is escaped into one XML tag within the metadata. Same with presentation layers, the actual view XML is escaped into one line within one attribute of the metadata file. The "view" xml may be thousands of lines but it is escaped into a single like of the export file so any change at all just shows that line as being changed in a diff. Attempts at extracting that data and unescaping it even seem to present problems because when the XML is exported often times the attributes within the schema are exported in a different order, etc.
- Social issues make gitlab better although there are also social downsides.
The people who submit fake/AI issues and PRs for resume purposes seem to exclusively use github and this is a substantial expense for the real users (see the recent Curl discussion). Gitlab doesn't have those people (or at least its a wildly smaller problem).
One social downside is noobs will insist a project does not exist if its not on github, even if you send them the gitlab URL. Almost have to physically cut and paste the gitlab URL into their browser for them before they will believe. You can either do nothing which filters them, not a bad idea, or create a clone or placeholder on GH that basically links back to the real repo on GL. I don't know if that is allowed in the ToS for GH but people certainly do it a lot.
- For a company that (optionally) wants to self-host stuff, I'd say GitLab is pretty great - it's there for you, be it in the cloud or on-prem and mostly works, if you have enough resources to throw at the instance.
It's not as demanding as a some of the other software out there, like a self-hosted Sentry install, just look at all of the services: https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-... in comparison to their self-contained single image install: https://docs.gitlab.com/install/docker/installation/#install...
At the same time it won't always have full on feature parity with some of the other options out there, or won't be as in depth as specialized software (e.g. Jira / Confluence) BUT everything being integrated can also be delightfully simple and usable.
I will say that I immensely enjoy working with GitLab CI at work (https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/), even the colleagues on projects using Jekins migrated over to it and seems like everyone prefers it as well, the last poll showing 0 teams wanting to use Jenkins over it (well I might later for personal stuff, but that's more tool-hopping, like I also browser and distro hop; to see how things have changed).
However, it was a bit annoying for me to keep up with the updates and the resource usage on a VPS so that's why my current setup is Gitea + Drone CI (might move over to Woodpecker CI) + Nexus instead of GitLab, and is way more lightweight and still has the features I need. Some people also might enjoy Forgejo or whatever, either way it's nice to have options!
- I like using it at work. I probably would use something lighter if I ever move off github though, as I've seen the IT throw more and more resources at it for simple usage with just 30-40 MRs per day.
Also the free version doesn't have PR requirements or multiple reviewers etc.
- It's okay. But I would definitely pick Forgejo over it for self-hosting these days. It's written in Go which is a lot better. Much faster, easier to set up, you can actually follow the code (sometimes I've had to read Gitlab's code to understand features and nearly always failed). Also no features are paid. The ones that made us eventually pay for Gitlab were mandatory reviews and merge trains. Tbh I don't think Forgejo has either of those features yet but at least when they are available they'll be free!
- One interesting point of GitLab for me is the self-hosted version, including the AI features (Duo) that can also be self-hosted and you can bring your own OpenAI/Anthropic key.
by prymitive
1 subcomments
- My biggest annoyance with gitlab is that the UI is one huge block of text on white background with absolutely no distinction between user content (like commit messages) and the interface itself, plus you have action buttons buried in the middle of the page.
And everything loads asynchronous causing blocks to dance around when the one above loads …
- I also like it. At one point I had my team move all of our team management to it as well. It was a little bit painful as first, but once you understand the issue, epic, milestone hierarchy it was it was great. The board feature that does kanban was cool. Switching from dedicated ec2 runners to pods in our cluster was less awesome…
- We use self-hosted GitLab at work. It’s really a pleasure to use, everything works the way it feels like it should. The main downside is the system resource requirements are absurd considering at any given time there’s only 1-2 people using the GitLab interface.
by hatmatrix
2 subcomments
- Yeah I started using GitLab for the same reason and also that FSF "approved" of its CE version. But doesn't hosting private repos on GitLab and using public repos on GitHub just give GitHub that much more monetizable value?
- I also like it. Been using it since around 2013.
But they have a massive backlog and they seem to be focusing their development resources on customer requests, obviously. So it could definitely use improvement.
by plagiarist
0 subcomment
- Maybe it's not applicable for private repos as much but GitLab has had far too many severe security bugs. I wouldn't consider using it.
- The only thing I currently miss is allowing me to use my own sub-domain for their Docker registry.
- I'm also using GitLab for personal projects. Works well enough.
- When I was at a large financial news company circa 2018, we were fully bought into developing in public on github. (they still are to a lesser extent)
The problem is that organising it on github was really really hard. Trying to find and group projects was notoriously difficult and the CI/CD offering was shit.
I joined a startup and it was on gitlab. The server was hosted by the runner was local. We could make arbitrary projects and CI/CD was a dream. Very simple but powerful.
The downside was at the time, it was offline every other week. However to administer, it was far far easier.
Github has improved, you can have organisations and chain them together. But its a motherfucker to administer. They move everything about monthly, and make it very difficult to work out which child org has which power.
The CI/CD has vastly improved, we have private runners. But.
They are really nasty to administer and monitor, and the language you use to make jobs is not that intuitive. It doesn't feel like a shell script with a docker wrapper.
If I had a choice, I'd move us over, but its a lot of faff, and we have so many work arounds.
by arikrahman
0 subcomment
- These days I see a lot of projects move to Codeberg, like Zig for example. Interesting to see how these product offerings will evolve over time.
- Another interesting choice of GitLab's CI is to effectively display `head -c N` of the logs instead of `tail -c N`.
Some builds produce a lot of output, and Gitlab simply truncates it. Your job failed? Good luck figuring out what went wrong :)
Showing the last N bytes makes so much more sense as a solution to the artificial problem of CI output being too large.
- Absolutely the same here. Same journey and same points. One added benefit is that you don't have to suffer through GH actions on GitLab as well.
They sometimes do braindead moves like prohibiting no-expiry-date access tokens but otherwise it's pretty smooth sailing.
And with recent migration to an SPA GitLab feels quicker and quicker.
- I'll add one more annoying part: testing the CI/CD script on gitlab. It doesn't exist, and it's hell.
Edit: perhaps it's skill issue too, but I'm annoyed they don't have a similar feature to jump to definitions as github does.
by apple4ever
0 subcomment
- I like GitLab but hate their pricing. Both as a personal user and a corporate user I'd love to give them money but their pricing is outrageous.
by glub103011
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by GenericDev
0 subcomment
- [dead]
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